New Yorkers experience policing differently depending on who they are and where they live. Some communities are patrolled; others are profiled. When your neighbors’ experiences are starkly different from your own, it can be almost impossible to understand their perspective.

The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), a state branch of the ACLU, hoped to spark a dialogue around race and police tactics in over-policed communities, and to engage voters on this divisive issue before New York City’s mayoral election. But the NYCLU also understood that traditional slogans and billboards weren’t enough to foster deep personal conversations and effective political action—the city needed real talk.

The organization engaged IDEO to help create a city-wide, nontraditional campaign. In talking with New Yorkers, the NYCLU advocates and IDEO designers honed in on two simple truths: Transformative conversations happen only when people feel safe enough to listen—and to speak. And people become more compassionate listeners once they themselves feel heard. In a time of entrenched interests and growing social conflict, listening can be a radical act.

Together, IDEO and the NYCLU designed Listening NYC, a grassroots campaign to promote interpersonal listening, meaningful discussion, and collective action around policing.

To get New Yorkers—famously brash and always bustling—to stop and listen to their neighbors, they created a pop-up installation called the Listening Room that travels through the city to catalyze one-on-one conversations. It’s a portable safe space, with tables, chairs, two walls that provide a degree of intimacy, and two sides left open for a feeling of psychological safety.

At the center of the experience is a deck of Conversation Cards that encourage New Yorkers to share their stories and hear those of others. Simple prompts like “I believe the role of police is to _____,” and questions like “A cop stops you in your neighborhood. What do you do?” empower people to find common ground. Through straightforward but structured activities like these, many New Yorkers who enter the Listening Room expecting to disagree instead find themselves sharing stories and opinions in ways they never imagined.

Beyond face-to-face dialogue, the Listening Room also features a radio loaded with stories from different neighborhoods across the city’s five boroughs. By turning the dial, visitors can learn about encounters with policing culture from fellow New Yorkers, including two NYPD officers.

To turn talk into action, visitors are invited to send a postcard to the mayor. People choose the policy proposals most important to them—from, “Police shouldn’t be disciplining kids in school” to, “If police want to read our emails, they should have to get a warrant”—and add them to a pre-stamped postcard dropped into a special “ballot box.” The NYCLU delivered more than 2,000 of these cards to Mayor Bill de Blasio upon his reelection in late 2017.

IDEO and the NYCLU also led an interactive campaign event at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Residents, students, philanthropists, and police were led through an exercise called Creative Tensions, positioning themselves around the room according to their views on everything from surveillance technology to school safety. Experts helped guide the conversation including Sheriff Jerry Clayton, director Liesl Tommy, and NYCLU organizer Brandon Holmes. The process allowed participants to see how fluid people’s positions can be.

Listening NYC has now reached thousands of New Yorkers at more than 35 locations. Schools, from a public middle school to the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, have requested visits from the Listening Room, and the installation’s modular design has inspired new incarnations on topics including student safety and discipline.

The NYCLU has sent Conversation Cards to celebrities, influencers, and every member of the New York City Council. Sending postcards to Mayor de Blasio and Conversation Cards to the city council led directly to passage of the Right to Know Act—legislation that incorporates some of the NYCLU’s proposals for police reform.

Today, the impact of Listening NYC has moved beyond city limits. The NYCLU’s Syracuse chapter is introducing the pop-up installation there, while in Boston, mayoral candidate Tito Jackson even promised a visit from the Listening Room if elected. To keep dialogue flowing, the ACLU plans to distribute Conversation Cards nationwide.

Fashion thrives on reinvention. Now, digital platforms and tools are reinventing fashion. E-commerce has reshaped the shopping experience and social media has democratized the once-exclusive industry.

Amidst this furious whirl of change, the fashion platform Zalando, founded in 2008, has become one of Europe’s fastest-growing tech companies. Headcount has ballooned to 15,000 and revenues grew 23 percent year over year. More than €1 out of every €100 spent on clothing in Europe is spent at Zalando.

In 2014, Zalando’s co-founder and CEO Robert Gentz approached IDEO to help think about the organization’s future in the face of increasing competition. Gentz realized that building design thinking capabilities across the company would allow Zalando to make systemic business shifts, like building better experiences for customers, and balancing operational excellence and execution with innovation.

So, he invited a team of IDEO designers and Zalando employees to create an innovation lab in its Berlin headquarters. They called it The Studio, and in the three years since its launch, it has helped the company build new products, experiences, and modes of working that are powering a digital transformation across Zalando and in the broader fashion world.

Finding purpose

Gentz came to IDEO with a simple request: “I want my daughter to be proud of the company I created.” With that directive, the first order of business was to home in on the organization’s new strategy—to shift from an e-tailer to a full-blown fashion platform—and resurface purpose. After a series of interviews and workshops across the company, a unifying intent emerged:

Zalando exists to reimagine fashion, for the good of all.

To share that message, the team designed a five-day Festival of Purpose at the company’s Berlin headquarters and satellite locations, coupled with a long-term plan to help leaders and their teams weave that sense of purpose into everything they do.

WATCH: Learn how Zalando used purpose to mobilize its community

Building Innovation Capacity

With a shared purpose to rally around, Zalando started to design and build at a clip. The Studio experimented and prototyped, launching products like Seen At, a mobile app that allows members to upload street style photos, and a digital tool called Collabary that connects online fashion influencers with brands. Projects are enabling cross-disciplinary teams to get into the practice of aligning around joint goals, making fast decisions, and building with agility.

But just as important as identifying growth opportunities for the company has been The Studio’s role as a hub. Zalando employees from across business units cycled into the Studio, teaching IDEOers about their business and the company’s culture, while IDEOers helped them master the design thinking process so they could lead future projects.

Studio graduates ensure that anything prototyped there is implemented, and integrate what they’ve learned into their day jobs. Their experience makes them design ambassadors who spread the practice of experimentation, prototyping, and storytelling across the organization.

WATCH: Learn how Zalando pioneered a new innovation studio

Teaching Leaders How to Scale Change

It’s one thing to start working differently in a small innovation lab, but how do you scale change across an organization and determine how it will affect each major business unit—product, technology, commercial, and logistics? IDEO interviewed Zalando employees to better understand how to embed what we called new Ways of Working (WoW), a method that combines design thinking with lean and agile approaches. WoW was then deployed by a centralized team that ran workshops and coaching sessions to help leaders adopt it, measure its impact through OKRs, KPIs, and NPSs, and help their teams understand the new processes.

Today, the Ways of Working method is being rolled out across the entire organization, reaching all 15,000 employees.

Together, the relationship between IDEO and Zalando and their multi-year project of change is spurring double-digit growth, and making good on the company’s vision of reimagining fashion, for the good of all.

WATCH: Learn how Zalando scaled new ways of working across their organization

IDEO helped position Shinho’s ingrained respect for food, family, and good health as a guiding principle for how the organization interacts with its employees and the wider world. The IDEO team integrated a new motto—“treat the world as family”—into every part of Shinho’s work, from sourcing and hiring to new ventures to the care employees take in handling each bottle of sauce destined for someone’s table.

To help transform Shinho’s internal culture, the IDEO team also crafted a narrative to communicate the company’s beliefs to new staff and outside partners. The team expressed Shinho’s foundational story through a published brand book and film, reimagined logo, and codified employee values.

“My proudest moment was when we brought the brand identity IDEO developed to life, and interpreted Shinho’s mission and vision through that lens in front of 2,000 employees at our annual meeting,” said Hanzhong Dong, Shinho's Head of Product, “It made me feel that even though we’re a group of ordinary people, we’re working on a great and meaningful thing."

Shinho’s heightened confidence and focus on supporting families has empowered the company to expand beyond soy sauce and snacks and explore new offers, from culinary training to sustainable farming to food experiences.

In July 2017, Shinho stepped onto the international stage as a tastemaker by participating in an event called Food Forward, hosted by the Michelin Guide and IDEO. Michelin-starred restaurants are synonymous with superb ingredients and service. Shinho crafts safe, organic, high-quality products that are staples for Chinese chefs, and the company shares the Michelin Guide’s aim to celebrate and expand the role of fine dining in China. IDEO brought all parties together with the shared goals of elevating China's culinary craft and culture, inspiring people around the future of food in China, and encouraging fruitful connections and partnerships.

IDEO and the Michelin Guide organized the day-long event, which included guest speakers, panel discussions, and tastings with four international, Michelin-starred restaurant chefs. Speakers and panelists discussed culinary education, inclusion, and the interplay between tradition and innovation in food. More than 200 people attended from across the food ecosystem: chefs, restaurateurs, journalists, investors, and educators. The event’s livestream garnered 30 million global views and 800,000 engagements.

Shinho’s products now reach 30 million families in 232 cities around the globe, driven by a cohesive mission and brand message. This kind of values-driven growth and hunger for new partnerships is setting the course for the future of food in China and throughout the region.

Despite the rapid growth of China's economy and increased access to a wider variety of food since the opening up, the market is saturated with unhealthy, processed snack foods. Consumers are increasingly seeking better-quality options, highlighting a significant gap in the food system.

30M families

purchase Shinho’s products

60 countries

around the globe offer Shinho products

Narvar, a software-as-a-service startup that provides a post-purchase engagement platform for retail clients, was scaling fast. The company had grown from 20 to 90 employees, and was well on its way to reaching 300 over the next two years. As the company grew, its leaders wanted to make sure it could sustain its vibrant, innovative culture. Narvar came to IDEO for help identifying and defining its values in a way that would would scale with the organization.

For the IDEO team, that meant articulating a system of values that supported existing behavior, reflected the company’s aspirations, and aided in evaluating new talent and development. The team started by interviewing key “culture carriers,” from the CEO to new hires, to learn what makes Narvar special. Based on this research, the team crafted a working set of values, then invited the entire company to share their feedback. In doing this work, IDEO was also able to surface organizational issues and tensions within the company for Narvar leaders to address.

Now, Narvar lives its values every day. Team members use them during candidate interviews, employees see them daily on company walls, and managers reinforce them during performance reviews. Every quarter, leadership gives out a Narvar values award to reinforce their importance. Through this project, Narvar was able to not only capture its core values, but also use them as an active ingredient in the company’s growth.

“We engaged IDEO to really understand the challenges we faced as an organization, and IDEO helped us define and articulate our culture and values. I can honestly say that all the growth and success we’ve achieved in the past two years—we couldn’t have done that without the foundation from IDEO,” said Narvar CEO and founder Amit Sharma.

Some of the best lessons I learned on the topic come from my time working at IDEO.org, our non-profit arm, which focuses on improving the lives of people living in poverty.

Here are some key lessons that can strengthen your approach, no matter where you’re designing.

1. Lead with empathy

While at IDEO.org, I worked on Health XO–a team focused on designing better access to birth control. Translation? We went into urban and rural communities throughout East Africa and talked to teens about their sex lives. These conversations are very personal for anyone, but for many of the teens we spoke to, having a sex life before marriage is stigmatized and risky. In this situation, having empathy meant considering all aspects of the topic: the individual experience, cultural taboos, and the larger community.

Because the stakes were high, I found myself paying particular attention to how I conducted research. Was the setting private enough for the young women to feel safe? Was a group interview among friends a better way to structure it? Would the girl feel more comfortable if we met a few times before launching into the more personal topics?

This experience made me realize how important it is to take a moment before every interview to make sure my attitude is collaborative, not extractive—even in for-profit design work. This makes all the difference in protecting and honoring the people you’re researching.

Ask yourself: What can I do to make this experience beneficial for my research subject? How might I approach their situation with empathy, and without the end-game in mind?

2. Find out what happens when no one is watching

Maybe you’re designing something you know a bit about. Or maybe you just have an idea about what would be cool to make, and prototyping seems like a waste of time. When we’re designing in our own backyards, it’s easy to ignore prototyping. But as I began designing in less and less familiar contexts, I found the value of prototyping increased significantly. The prototypes had to speak for themselves.

When our team worked with a local organization in the Kibera neighborhood of Nairobi, we were tasked with finding more effective ways to engage men and boys in reporting instances of gender-based violence. In order to understand the contexts where people felt most comfortable making reports, we worked with local metalworkers to build boxes where anyone could anonymously drop a written report about incidents. We installed them throughout the neighborhood: in bars, public toilets, on the street, and in barbershops. Within a few days, we began to see patterns in where reports were—or weren’t—submitted. This informed our strategy going forward.

Prototyping is especially important if you want to observe behaviors that can be difficult to suss out through interviews alone.

Ask yourself: How might we build a stand-alone prototype that more effectively gauges how people might behave when nobody’s watching?

3. Help your clients build their own design skills

Deliverables matter. But without client ownership, even the most thoughtful design can gather dust. This is true no matter who your client is. But when you factor in a separation of 9,586 miles between you and your client, skill-building suddenly feels much more important.

One of the largest scale projects I worked on with IDEO.org was with Marie Stopes International. Our goal was to design avenues for teen access to birth control information and services, across all of Kenya. We worked side-by-side with the health workers who go from town to town as traveling medics. Not only were we learning from them, but we were also able to share how they could use design thinking methods to improve their current model.

Making sure that all team members have the tools they need starts with understanding the value that you—and your clients—bring. Our partners on the ground offered incredible expertise in the local landscape, regulations, and healthcare needs. We offered tools and a way of thinking that enabled these healthcare providers to try new ways of working, based on human-centered insights and a shared vision.

Ask yourself: What are the superpowers that my client has? How can I harness this knowledge in our designs, and include them in the creative process?

See what I mean about constraints? The next time you’re approaching a design project, take a moment to consider how you approach your work. Chances are, a step back from your day-to-day perspective will help improve your process, and your output.

Constraints are a designer’s best friend. When you have a small budget or a tight timeframe, constraints help you focus, force tough decisions, and require you to take a very exact approach. The more I design, the more I have come to value constraints. When you’re working on low budgets in emerging economies, with a language barrier, or in rural conditions, embracing the design process is key.

So last summer, in search of some sort of spark, I decided to take on a personal project: I would make one animated GIF per day, every day, until I felt like stopping.

It may sound silly. GIFs often are. But it turns out, making GIFs is a great design exercise.

For one thing, they’re extraordinarily simple by design. Steve Wilhite, a computer scientist working at Compuserve, the first big online service company in the U.S., created the GIF in 1987. He had been asked to make a simple graphics format that works on all kinds of computers and could display sharp images even over slow internet connections. (Yes, in the late 80s the image quality of a GIF was considered “sharp.”) One of the first animated GIFs is this famous airplane.

What he wasn't asked to do was create a platform for animation. In fact, the spec sheet for the then-new file format clearly states that though GIFs could be used for very limited animation, that isn’t what they were made for.

But that’s largely what we use them for these days, which means we end up working under a lot of constraints. And creativity thrives under constraints! You have to experiment to leverage limitations and quirks and make them work to your advantage. When you make a GIF, you’re working with a limited color palette (less than 256 colors). Your animation has to be very short and simple or else your file size will be so big that the GIF is no longer easy to share / quick to load. The small file size might frustrate you, but it also might force you to think more abstractly about the most concise way to communicate something complicated.

Another defining constraint: GIFs generally loop. And since those loops are short, you’ll usually see this a GIF in its entirety a couple of times. The best GIFs take advantage of this constraint and make it a central component of their design.

One last incredible thing about animated GIFs: They’re not precious. People aren’t afraid to mess with them. So many animated GIFs are the result of people adding to or altering or juxtaposing existing media, which is sort of like a weird form of collaboration if you look at it from the right angle.

With all those things in mind, I started the challenge.

Since each of these were so small and self-contained (I worked on them once for a limited amount of time and then never returned to them), I felt free to make some that were purely formal or technological explorations, which is not typically my jam. I played around with the tools and applications to see the unexpected things I could do with them. Stakes were low, possibilities endless.

This project revived my passion for making things. Because of the medium’s limitations and my self-imposed one-GIF-per-day requirement, I couldn’t let what I made get too complex. The GIFs were quick, self-contained, and ultimately really joyful to create. I had to to embrace experimentation and overcome the fear of sharing "bad" design that plagues so many designers. If you force yourself to make and share something new every single day, guess what? Some of that stuff probably isn't going to be your best work, and that's all right. This is an attitude and approach that I've carried with me since starting my GIF project, and I think it's made me a much bolder and better designer.

Eventually, a cross-country move and a new job meant I was both more regularly inspired through my work and a whole lot busier, so I stopped making daily GIFs. But I have decided to keep up with weekly GIFs—and a lot of my colleagues in Chicago are now doing it with me. It sounds like a small project, but for us, it has made it easier to share half-baked ideas, inspire each other, and keep on making.

Need a little help getting started? I learned by converting from video to GIF with Photoshop, and this guide can explain how. And for those who are less technologically inclined or don’t have access to Photoshop, Giphy’s GIF Maker is a great tool.

In a previous job, I was really struggling to feel inspired or challenged. That’s not ideal when your job is to be creative and make things, so I was a bit desperate to find something that could help me rediscover the joy in making—after all, that was what had drawn me to becoming a designer in the first place.

I kept going over books, blogs, and videos, hoping for a moment where it all clicked and suddenly I became a chip whisperer. But it just wasn’t happening.

Then things changed. I bashed my fingers into my keyboard for days, failing over and over again until finally—it worked. I had a project idea that tickled my brain in just the right way. It was weird, and it was mine. I made something work, something I liked and that was just for me. I’ve been chasing that high ever since.

Looking back, I can see now that what really changed my relationship to code was letting my creative process lead. I was trying to make “useful” stuff, and that's not always necessary when you’re learning. Let the weird in! We worry about how the computer thinks when we’re learning to code, assuming that it’s smarter. It’s not. It’s a dumb box with lots of opinions. When I started worrying less about how it thought and more about what I was trying to achieve, I was able to find little toeholds in the translation process. I was able to work backwards from an idea, and break it down into tiny little steps. These steps are what every code project is made of.

I wanted to help my colleagues glimpse this feeling of creativity and control over programming—without having them touch a computer. I’m a lover of generative art and have long been inspired by the work of Sol LeWitt. His works are sets of instructions that can be interpreted and performed by anyone. This is also how a computer works. You give it instructions and it interprets them to perform some kind of function. (Literally, the part of the computer that reads code is called an “interpreter.”)

Our studio has a bi-weekly tradition called Make(Believe)Time. At each session, a member of the studio comes up with a creative activity to get us out of our heads and thinking more playfully. It might be to invent a new game, design advertisements for a future Earth invaded by aliens, or exploring our senses through making something strange. Ben Swire runs Make(Believe)Time and helped me craft a session that made this translation of code come to life with needle and thread. Each person received sewing supplies and a blank manila card (made to look like an old Fortran punch card). Everyone was asked to write simple instructions for a stitch on the card. Here are a few:

Ben and I shuffled and distributed the cards into groups. We explained that each card is a statement, a simple bit of instructions to be interpreted by the individual sewer. When each person was done with their statement card, they were to pass it to their neighbor until the group had shuffled through all of the statements. Each group of sewers would be acting like a programming function, performing a collection of simple directives.

When a group was done performing their “function,” their data (aka, the cards) was passed to another group. Much like in a computer, data was passed from one function (output) to another where it was added to (input). We were a human computer!

We were delighted to see the wild differences between each group's interpretation. That balance between constrained instruction and broad interpretation touched an interesting space between active and passive creativity. It was fun and inspiring to see the wide range of outputs that came from such simple instructions.

We’d love to hear how you explain complex processes through tangible experience. Send us your story!

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Despite what I was led to believe, learning to code was excruciating. Throughout the process, I was convinced that I was dumb and should just get really, really good at Excel because that’s as close as I’d ever get to making a computer do anything by typing at it.

In the beginning, we hadn’t been assigned to client projects yet, so we found ourselves on what IDEO designers call “whitespace,” meaning we had some time on our hands while we waited for placements.

With so many newbies wandering the studio, and more joining the ranks every week, it was becoming hard to keep all the new faces straight. Our colleague Annette, one of our co-experience directors, saw an opportunity for us to revive a studio-wide program that set up any two IDEOers to go out to lunch on the studio’s dime once a month. The idea was to help establish new connections, but busy colleagues would often cancel lunch plans and the task of scheduling (and rescheduling) soon fell to one of our beloved leadership coordinators, Biz. As a result, this benefit had become severely underutilized.

Our mission: to use data science to (mostly) automate the scheduling process so that newbies and veterans alike could easily participate in the program. The tool would need to assign “optimal” groups of Chicago IDEOers, search their calendars for a mutually agreeable time, and send them an invitation to go to lunch together. Here’s how we did it:

1. Designing the perfect group

We started by asking a seemingly simple question: What makes a good group? To find out, we practiced our design research skills in some working sessions with Annette and Biz.

Annette suggested that we create groups of three, rather than two, based on social science research that finds triads are more conducive to sparking creative collaborations and community than dyads. That fact inspired us to call the program “Meet ‘n Three,” a play on the traditional Southern combo meal offering of a protein and three sides.

Together, we decided that groups should comprise three people whose paths don’t cross day-to-day, while also striking a balance of design disciplines—not all interaction designers or all data scientists. And an ideal triad would mix people who were new to the studio with those who had been around longer. With these principles ironed out, we got to building the algorithm.

2. Creating custom datasets

To build the groups, we needed some data on our coworkers. We turned to IDEO’s intranet to get a list of everyone who worked at a given IDEO location, their disciplines, and projects they’d worked on. We combined that with manually-created datasets that contained each person’s level of seniority and discipline. Using this data and the earlier criteria, we created an algorithm that randomly samples employees, generating one group at a time. Once a person is in one group, their likelihood of being chosen for another decreases; to spare their calendars, no employee can be in more than two groups.

The group is then assigned a score for its “novelty,” which includes the number of disciplines represented, the variety of seniority, and the number of projects shared between group members. The algorithm optimizes the score for an entire month’s worth of groups using a Monte Carlo approach. (In other words, we create many more groups than we actually need, and throw away all but those with the highest scores.)

3. Addressing the scheduling conflict

Once we have a group, all that’s left is to find a time for them to meet. Through the Google Calendar API, we were able to get a list of available times on people’s calendars. Since these times aren’t uniform, this data structure isn’t easy to work with. After many frustrating attempts to create a functional system, we realized that fellow data scientist (and Datascope co-founder) Mike Stringer had already solved this problem (albeit for a different reason). We used the Python library he created to perform unevenly spaced time series analysis, saved ourselves heaps of wasted time and energy, and learned a lesson: When surrounded by world-class nerds, phone a friend before trying to reinvent the wheel.

4. Putting the Meetbot to work

As designers, we knew that creating the algorithm was only half the battle—we also had to share our work to make it successful. To give the bot some personality, we created a mascot we dubbed Meaty the Meetbot, a friendly humanoid meatball on a mission to bring people together. We introduced Meaty (and his functionality) during an office-wide lunch meeting. The newly-minted Meetbot was better suited to the IDEO Chicago of 2018 than the old program: it scaled to accommodate the 45% increase in employees, and infused a little data science flavor. For the big finale, we sent out the first batch of invites all at once, so everyone received them at the same time.

Since Meaty’s initial rollout in late March, there have been 112 group lunches in Chicago (according to Google calendar), bringing together everyone from support staff to directors to designers. Word spread to other studios, and the Palo Alto and San Francisco offices are on deck to start their own group lunches. Meaty has also virtually connected IDEOers around the world, scheduling calls between design researchers in Cambridge and New York, and handling the time-zone-juggling challenge of scheduling global calls between Munich, Shanghai, and Tokyo.

Although Meaty the Meetbot was born as a silly thing to tinker with until we had “real work” to do, it’s had real impact. For us, it’s been a reminder that even in seemingly inane projects, data and algorithms can be used in service of human interactions. By letting a computer take over the grunt work, we freed up some (way more valuable) human time, making room for people to connect and create. Maybe there is such a thing as a free lunch.

Late last year, IDEO acquired data science firm Datascope, adding 18 data scientists to the Chicago studio’s roster overnight. We’re two of those data scientists.

I help organizations cut through complexity by shaping how they show up, through brand strategy, identity, and storytelling.

Working at the intersection of brand and business, I bring an editorial eye and a bias toward making—turning ideas into tangible experiences that people can understand, trust, and believe in.

My work spans government, healthcare, financial services, media, and consumer goods, from launching Gen Z-focused ventures to building innovation labs and reimagining legacy brands. I relish moments of ambiguity and enjoy translating across teams, perspectives, and priorities to move ideas forward.

I started my career in editorial and digital design, shaping cross-platform experiences and identity systems in publishing and agency environments. That foundation still shapes how I work today: I’m detail-oriented, collaborative, and overreliant on the Oxford comma. I hold a BFA in Visual Communication from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

For 25 years, I've asked the same question: Who does this design exclude—and what are we going to do about it?

My work spans human-centered strategy, inclusive design, and qualitative research, with clients ranging from Microsoft, Google, and Verizon to the National Science Foundation, and San Francisco Unified School District.

Before IDEO, I taught elementary school in East Palo Alto and spent a decade doing design work with social service organizations—where I learned firsthand what it costs people when systems are built without them in mind.

I am currently writing User Error, a nonfiction book about digital access and the design decisions behind it. I live in Oakland, California.

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My expertise spans brand, communication, and product design across tech, education, the arts, and social impact.

I believe great work demands both high-level vision and obsessive attention to detail, and only happens through collaboration.

I bring an inclusive, hands-on approach and a deep understanding of business, which enables me to consistently deliver excellence while always asking why.

Before joining IDEO, I worked at the brand firms Pentagram and VSA Partners. I began my career as a designer, leading teams at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Milwaukee Art Museum. I hold an MFA in graphic design from Maryland Institute College of Art and a BFA in communication design from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, and have taught at some of the best design schools in the US.

I am responsible for IDEO’s long-term success in China and working with clients to use design as a tool to enable growth. Specifically, I have helped Chinese companies design holistic brand solutions through the development of their products, communication, services, and innovation teams, and I have helped multinationals expand their presence and influence in China.

I advise global leaders on developing China-led innovation and capabilities.

In over 15 years in IDEO Shanghai, I have worked on projects that use design to elevate the quality of the experience of healthcare products and services, streamline processes that increase productivity, create spaces and programs that promote and enable inclusive communities, and build next generation mobility solutions that are planet-positive.

Before joining IDEO, I worked at Philips Electronics and the Electrolux Group in Italy, the Netherlands, and Singapore on a number of breakthrough commercial products. I am a member of the Young President Organization in Shanghai.

Most AI products today are built for work—a space with clear problems and established systems. One founder noticed a gap: personal life is messier, harder to systematize, and mostly left behind by the AI boom. So she built Cue, a personal AI that lives inside iMessage and group chats, to go where the other tools haven't.

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In this episode, Becca Carroll, IDEO's Chief Strategy Officer, talks with Sida Li, co-founder and CEO of Shared Context Lab, about staying anchored to a human need while the technology around her keeps changing shape, why she treats her business model with the same rigor she'd bring to a product, and what it feels like to build a company at this particular, disorienting moment in AI.

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The conversation also gets into how Sida makes design decisions: the language Cue uses to describe itself, the tradeoffs behind building inside iMessage instead of a new app, and a real story about a business idea that didn’t pan out.

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This is the second in a two-part series profiling founders from IDEO's Startups-in-Residence program. The first conversation is with Johannes Seemann, founder of Sooner, on designing GenAI for the emotional side of money.

Most personal financial tools are built to run the numbers and optimize towards a budget. While that works for some, most people experience money as a lived relationship that does not neatly fit into a spreadsheet. Johannes Seemann and Becca Carroll discuss why money is emotional before it is mathematical, and what a human-centered approach to building a generative AI financial product looks like in practice.

Mina Seetharaman talks with Scott Shigeoka, author of Seek and Head of Curiosity Cultivation at the Eames Institute, about what distinguishes genuinely curious leadership from performative curiosity, how power dynamics shape curiosity, and why practicing curiosity can restore energy rather than drain it.

Mina Seetharaman talks with David Epstein, author of Inside the Box and Range, about why total freedom often produces average work, how leaders can design useful limits on purpose, and what organizations such as General Magic and Pixar reveal about the relationship between boundaries and creativity.